|
 |
AN INTERVIEW WITH SUZANNE LYON
Q. Your newest book, A Heart for Any Fate, tells the story of your great-great-great-great grandmother, Hannah Cole’s, journey from Virginia to frontier Missouri. Did you grow up hearing about her?
A. When we’d visit my relatives in Missouri we would sometimes stop at the roadside cemetery where Hannah is buried. I was vaguely aware that she had some historic significance, but I didn’t know the details. It wasn’t until I started my book that I realized what an amazing woman she was.
Q. What prompted you to delve into her story?
A. Credit for that goes to my uncle, Bill Lyon, a professor of history at Northern Arizona University. For fifty years he’s been tracking down Hannah and Stephen Cole’s story, and that culminated in an article he wrote for a local historical society publication. When I became a writer, he suggested that Hannah would make a terrific subject for one of my books. Frankly, I ignored him for a while—after all, everyone thinks their own family history makes for good reading when the reality is usually quite different. But he persisted, sending me his files on the subject. I read through them and got hooked!
Q. What kind of research did you do to ferret out the story?
A. Bill had already documented most of the historical details, to the extent possible. I followed up on all of his sources, and added quite a bit of my own research into what life was like back in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I tried to follow in Hannah’s footsteps, visiting the area of southwest Virginia where she was raised, going over the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, scouting out Boonville, Missouri, where she finally settled.
Q. How much of A Heart for Any Fate is fact and how much is fiction?
A. It’s hard to say. Where we know from documented sources exactly what happened, that’s how I portray events in the book. But very few records were kept in that time and place, so there is much we don’t know. I filled in the blanks with my imagination, although I would like to think that everything I wrote could plausibly have occurred.
Q. What was your purpose in bringing Dolley Madison into the story?
A. First of all, she may indeed have been a first cousin to Hannah’s husband, Temple Cole (genealogical records are unclear, but it appears her mother was a sister to Temple’s father.) Secondly, I needed a vehicle for Hannah to express her innermost thoughts and the journal in which she writes to Dolley filled that requirement. Thirdly, I wanted to portray Hannah’s struggle against the backdrop of national affairs and who but Dolley Madison was more at the center of those affairs?